The
New Normal(revised)
It
is time to feel excited that 2020 will be a footnote in the annals of world
History in less than a week from today. Without an exception, even the
atheists, agnostics and sceptics will join the god believers and the eternal
optimists to wish and pray for a new dawn when all the anxieties, worries, fears,
sadness and sufferings of 2020 would be just history. With hope and excitement,
we all look forward to the dawn of 2021 –if not for a miracle to happen- at
least for a relief from the one in hundred years pandemic that has drained humanity of its physical and psychic
energy.
What
a year it has been- a challenge to us humans that touched every aspect of our
lives. WHO had christened the new highly infectious killer disease,
COVID(Corona Virus Disease) when it first surfaced in China in October 2019 and
spread its tentacles globally in less than three months.
Its growth had been terrifyingly rapid, affecting one and all, without social
,gender and class discrimination, sparing neither the rich nor the poor nor the middleclass, nor the
urban-rural fringe.
The
new word Corona has not remained just a medical term, but has become a part of
our everyday conversation. It is unbelievable
how from the sanitary worker to the
vegetable vendor to the street pedlar, from highbrows to lowbrows, from the cultured
to the philistine, from the sophisticated to the shallow, from the cerebral to
the dull-witted, from memsahebs to maids, two English words - ‘masks’ and ‘Lockdown’
- have become a part of their vocabulary.
These two words along with ‘vaccine’ and
the ‘ new normal’ have gained a ubiquitous status. Imperative injunctions that earlier
disapproved of idioms such as ‘being
masked’ and ‘being negative’ have shed
off their undesirability and gained acceptability among all sections of society.
One of the Whatsapp messages that
has been forwarded many times has the
oratorical quip a la Brutus’ rhetorical funeral oration in
Shakespeare’s Julius
Ceasar:
Who is here
so callous that would not wear a mask ?
If any, speak: him
I leave to your judgement.
Who
is here so unsocial that would not self distance by six feet?
If
any speak ; him I leave to your judgement.
Who
is here so vile that would not love his fellow beings?
If
any speak ; him I leave to your judgement
Who is here so dull that refuses to be negative
If
any speak, him I leave to your judgement
Who is here so foolish not to want to be negative
If any speak, him I leave
to your judegment
Who is here with unshakeable faith in the golden precept ‘be
positive’
If any speak, him I leave to your judgement.
Who is here so lawless who refuses the ‘new normal’
If any, speak; him I leave to your judgement
The
new normal is to hide behind the mask and remain to some extant incognito till
COVID gets masked by vaccine that shall play its three-in-one role as our protector,
preserver and saviour. The new injunctions about masks, keep safe distance and wash
hands frequently is nothing new,but
only ancient wisdom in modern idiom. I
recall, eight decades back, my father’s quotidian question at the dining table :”
Have you washed your hands”? He would expect us to repeat Eliza Dolittle’s
answer to Henry Higgins( my father was a great lover of Bernard Shaw and remembered
lines from My Fair Lady with ease); ‘I ain’t dirty. I washed my face and hands
before I come. I did ‘. The notable difference is there was no sanitizer in
those days. Even the word ‘sanitizer’was not a common one. The closest one got
to was ‘sanitary inspector’ The water we
used to wash our hands was more often
than not well water (as most houses had a well in the backyard). There was no
escape from the patriarchal command. Similarly returning home the first thing was to discard the footwear
in the outer veranda and go straight to the bucket placed near the entrance or
to the well in the backyard and wash one’s
hands and feet. In course of time these habits were forgotten once we started
entering the dining room with shoes on and eating with forks and spoons( mainly
the urban inhabitors -both the urban
naxals and the urban anti naxals). COVID has recalled these old habits and
reminded us how far we have moved away from our hoary wisdom.
But
COVID is also mocking our positive attitude. It has been dinned into our ears from
our early days to stay positive, be happy, look adversity in the eye and remain
optimistic. 20th Century English dramatist Edward Bond had remarked
“We are optimistic by intuition and pessimists by experience”. Ironically Covid
has given us the reverse experience to give up intuitive optimism and embrace
the pessimistic negativism. Everyone who goes through the antigen or RT-PCR
test regains his positive cheer only after results declare him as negative.
Where do we stand now? Be positive or be negative? Well the road to positivity
seems through negativity. Covid has taught us not to be foolishly optimistic
all the time, but go through the grind of negativism to emerge positive. With experience,
seek negative; with hope and faith be positive.
Hope and faith are no longer to be based on feelings but on facts. We
have reason to hope as we find human ingenuity coming with vaccine at the darkest hour. The speed of the miniscule
Corona virus measuring 120nanometre has found its match in human inventiveness
with its speed of research and discovery of vaccines to put brakes on its fast
and furious spread.
True,
it is darkest before dawn. We have had experience of staying in the mother’s
womb for nine full months. Our anti natal experience has helped us stay put now
during the Lockdown for almost 12 if not 12+ months. We have remained
incarcerated inside our homes with shut windows and closed doors to caution the
Virus that thou shall not cross the
doorsill of our homes. For once in the
early months we followed our hon’ble Prime Minister’s dictum to draw the
Lakshman rekha( a strict convention of rules not to be traversed that will lead to undesirable consequences)
to ensure that going out and coming in are prohibited. Much to our dismay, on those
occasions like navratra pooja and Diwali when some defiantly crossed the line,
we let in the virus to play havoc with millions of lives. Luckily there were
quite a number of law abiding citizens who adhered to the norms to save ourselves and others from
the virus . They along with doctors and
healthcare workers including the sanitary staff have been the sentinels to keep
the virus at bay. The new normal has given us a new proverb: “Six feet distance keeps the Virus at bay. The Pandemic has triggered
in us a semblance of discipline, though a lot many chafe against it as an
infringement on their freedom. They fail
to understand that the Pandemic is a one
in 100 visitation while our festivities
come every year. A small step in discipline today,, a giant leap towards a secure future.
Yet another new normal is to greet with
‘namaste’ and folded hands. The Western
practice of handshake and the middle east practice of hugging that became
universal practice has been pushed aside in favour of the Indian way of
greeting with folded hands. Our PM’ s signature bear hug that excluded female
world leaders, leaders of countries with lower GDP, with below average FDI,
with no significant bilateral debt with India and with less number of NRIs etc can no longer be
discriminatory as pandemic has imposed greetings from a distance with folded
hands. Greetings have become formal and
distant.
In
his new book Now It’s Come to Distances:
Notes on Shaheen Bagh, Coronavirus,
Association and Isolation Soumyabarta Choudhhury states that the whole
world today is confronted with fhe brute fact of human mortality. The global
assault of the pandemic has brought about a global impasse- “not simply an
impasse of ‘ oh! we can’t go out. , we
can’t do our usual routine things ... but an impasse of not having the adequate
concept for the situation”. I remember in despair I used to look for
astrological predictions as to when the pandemic will ease off . I asked an
astrologer friend of mine why all the positive indications of the movement of
stars and planets as predicted by famous astrologers had failed, she answered
warily that this visitation of virus has gone beyond all our knowledge and all
our calculations. We need new knowledge,
new approach, new strategy to figure out the whys and whats of such a
visitation. It is impossible to abstract knowledge from whatever limited
resource we have had. We need a new normal.
Soumyabrata says the same thing: “
the threshold of the new...is what I call the impossible. So the
impossible is what makes us do what we do...When we do something new, when we
produce something new, when we say something new, it is the impossible that
makes it possible, paradoxically” The new normal is to accept that this is the
world we belong to. We are at an impasse. We have to overcome it, however
impossible it may seem. In that very attempt, the new normal will throw up
possibilities to resist the impasse and liberate the world from it.
2020
will be gone in another sixty hours( i write this on the 28th
afternoon). We need not attempt to consign it to the history book. The lessons
we learnt as collective humanity against a tiny virus will have to be
remembered. Corona Virus has made the world a level playing field. It has spared
none -from Donald Trump to Bolsanaro,
from Boris Johnson to Emmanuel Macaron, PM of Russia to PM of Armenia besides
billions of men and women from the lowest to the highest rung of the social
ladder. Let us not forget the lessons that for once shook us to become aware
of the common thread of humanity that runs through all of us. Let us affirm without fear the universality
of human mortality. Let us remember 2020
with gratitude that has made us realize we are human beings who have
unwittingly been host to the virus and suffered en masse the consequences. From
arrogance to humility, from bluster to quietness, from bravado to modesty let
us look at ourselves not as conquerors
of the world and the universe, but
recognize that the world holds for us a
blank slate on which we re-write the
normal that we had forgotten, the normal that we had discarded and the normal
that waits to be re-engineered as the
new normal .